Well, alright! THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about, see!

A little over a month ago I coughed up a brief nugget of grousing with regards to some particularly macabre accountancy being undertaken by the folks at EPA. Instead of setting their bean counters to the task of devaluing the human life by approximately $1,000,000—presumably to lay a surreptitious thumb on the industry-friendly side of the cost-benefit scales—the EPA would be far better used, and we’d be better served, were they to approach the task of more accurately valuing intact, productive natural systems, and to account for losses—real monetary losses—borne by those impacted by natural systems’ destruction.

We look at a forest and count board feet at some projected market value. What’s the replacement cost on the carbon dioxide-to-oxygen exchange?

That’s the sort of economic challenge that I’d much rather the folks at EPA sink their teeth into.

So, needless to say, it pleased me to no end to catch this article in today’s paper as I rode BART work this morning.

Gretchen Daily wants to protect the planet by convincing governments and big investors there’s money to be made – or at least saved – in preserving nature instead of exploiting it.

It’s a fresh approach to conservation that is drawing international attention to this unpretentious Stanford biologist who has garnered some of the world’s most prestigious scientific honors. At its most basic, Daily is figuring out how to put a price tag on the natural world. And colleagues say she has done what many scientists have not: connected theory to practice.

Duly noted that this research is taking place within academia as opposed to the public sector, but fine. It’s underway, and it’s receiving section-front, above-fold coverage. Right the hell on.

Admission / full-disclosure: I bailed, running and screaming, on my early intentions to pursue an undergraduate major in economics. Having rather enjoyed my freshman year introductory micro- and macro- classes, and having come to an early though not well articulated sense for the extent to which our environmental challenges were economic at their root, I thought (briefly) that a geology and economics double major might set me up quite nicely for a professional life in the environmental field.

Then I hit intermediate microeconomics.

I think it was a lecture on diminishing marginal utility that caused something in my cerebellum to snap. The example the professor used to illustrate his point was leaving the water running while brushing your teeth, as there’s no appreciable value to the (wasted) resource. Even in moist New England, more than 20 years ago, this just struck me as completely perverse. And it dawned on me that any field of study so deeply rooted in ”all other things being equal,” and that is predicated upon assumption after assumption—none of which are likely to actually pan out when you bother to ground truth them—is probably not where I should focus my energy.  

I became more convinced of the fact that environmental challenges were economic in nature, but in addition, going further, of the likelihood that many of them were exacerbated if not caused altogether by the deep flaws in the western economics toolbox, and the damage done through their application.  

But, so long as growth is unquestioned king—and unfortunately it is—it’s the toolbox that we have. And I am heartened to see that the need to recognize the very real, and quite irreplaceable, value delivered by viable natural systems is being undertaken, and is being given notice.

Oh, man, I just love this… me:

We continue to treat our resource base as an ATM machine tied to an account whose balance is always assumed to be well in the black. We have a long way to go in seeing to it that cost benefit analysis adequately captures the value of resources and systems.

and Gretchen Daily:

“Here’s how I often think about it: If you look at nature today, it’s almost like an all-you-can-eat buffet: Unless you set a price tag on the different things on the table … people are going to go whole hog like we are now and eat all they can as fast as they can.”

Go git ‘em Gretchen. And thank you for giving me cause to get my gloat on this Monday morning.

the real work is the change

My introduction to the work of Andy Goldsworthy took place through coffee table books of his photographed works at some point in the early to mid ’90s. Then still employed in geology, and at the beginning of an ongoing struggle with the how, when, why, and where to nurture and apply my creative impulses, I harbored an initial response of being very impressed and inspired, but at the same time being totally naive and unfair: picture me smacking my forehead, thinking to myself: “of course. why didn’t I think of that?”

The 2001 documentary Rivers and Tides chronicles Goldsworthy’s global travels, life in Scotland, and his work: for lack of a better term, sculpture, rising from the materials and forces that are available for use at the particular place (stone, wood, leaves, water, ice, trees, sheep wool, diurnal tides, gravity, etc.) and at the particular time within which he happens to find himself working.

More than plenty has been written in print and online in reaction to this film. I pretend to shed no fresh light on the subject here. But having had the recent opportunity to see this movie for the fourth time, I’ve decided that I really need to just go purchase a permanent copy. It has transformed into a touchstone.

I remember catching in a local print article, at the time that I saw the movie upon its release, that Rivers and Tides saved San Francisco’s Roxie Theater from closing. On the precipice of having to shut down, they’d had the film on their schedule (if I recall correctly, they were the only house in the city to run it), it packed the house, repeatedly, and they extended its run for several days. (Great story. Hope I’m recalling it correctly.)

My naivety described above was totally dissolved upon my initial viewing of the dedication, the early starts, the disappointments, and—here’s the real deal killer for me—the necessarily solitary nature of what he does and how he approaches it.

But what continues to really touch me, to my core, about his work is the keen focus on aiming to understand the nature of the materials available as a necessary foundation to his creating art that reflects an understanding of the place he works in, and especially of how time, soldiering on as it will, is a constant presence and force that works upon that place.

Impermanence figures prominently, as an usher, guiding new forms and new life to their seats.

This post’s title is a quote Goldsworthy offers in the film in a moment of self-reflection on his aims and efforts. It hit me, upon most recent viewing, as a worthy mantra.

I’ve depreciated. And so have you.

I’d have otherwise thought that knuckling under to White House pressure to edit the technical findings of its own top scientists would otherwise make for a full day’s work over at the EPA. Ever the diligent body of public servants though, their drive to serve is truly something to behold.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

I get it that this manner of calculation is part and parcel of the sausage-making that is the development and implementation of policy and regulation. And I get, in principle, that a thorough accounting of estimated economic impact is a critical part of the process. There’s the rub.

We continue to treat our resource base as an ATM machine tied to an account whose balance is always assumed to be well in the black. We have a long way to go in seeing to it that cost benefit analysis adequately captures the value of resources and systems.

We look at a forest and count board feet at some projected market value. What’s the replacement cost on the carbon dioxide-to-oxygen exchange?

That’s the sort of economic challenge that I’d much rather the folks at EPA sink their teeth into.

Yuk it up, laughing boy.

Good freakin’ gravy. It’s all just one big fat joke to this guy.

President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit.

As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

President Bush made the private joke in the summit’s closing session, senior sources said yesterday. His remarks were taken as a two-fingered salute from the President from Texas who is wedded to the oil industry. He had given some ground at the summit by saying he would “seriously consider” a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050.

Thanks for the serious consideration, George. Your special brand of leadership–particularly when you take your show on the road–fits in totally with our status as the world’s biggest polluter. And it also indicates that, like so many of the worst industrial offenders to whom your administration has given carte blanche, you’ve never been taught how or required to clean up the foul plume you leave in your wake.

Driven to reconsider

My partner and I were chatting about cars over the weekend–while stuck in tollbooth-snarled Bay Bridge traffic, as it so happened–and I got called to task for the negativity of my take on the matter.

A Smart Car passed us to the left; we both offered up a little bit of surprise, as we’d heard anecdotally that they were not recommended for freeway speeds. Traffic was moving at a chilled-syrup clip, so there was no problem in that regard. I’ve since learned through their website that the Smart Fortwo’s engine is electronically limited to a top speed of 90 mph, which just once again underscores the edict admonishing one to avoid believing everything that one hears.

Anyhow, my better half offered up that there seems to be some resurgence in the availability of smaller cars, not to mention a ramped-up rate of development of fuel train technologies over and beyond the standard-fare, gas-based, internal combustion engine. And, yes, he is correct, things do seem to be moving.

My comment–the one that sort of set him off on a mission to justifiably take me to manners school, and which I’ll explain below–was an observation on the collective stupidity of the otherwise, by all accounts, extremely intelligent human species; and how frustrating I found it to be that adequate information (particularly regarding petroleum supplies and climate) has been available for decades. Instead, we wait until our collective nards are caught in a vice grip upon whose handle the cosmos has given another quarter-revolution clockwise turn before we decide to do something.

“Okay,” he said, “refuse to let me enjoy the development. We’re all doomed.”

Ouch. Crap.

Sigh.

Point taken.

Yes. I’ll concede, and repeat: there are changes afoot in the arena of transportation. These changes are necessary, and they are good.

My gut tells me that we’re in for a period of increasing choice and also some unavoidable market instability over the next, oh, let’s say decade, give or take. It’ll be like the VHS vs. Beta marketplace showdown, only on a much larger scale of impact, and likely requiring a longer chunk of time to settle and to develop the requisite supporting infrastructure. Consider: one manufacturer is emphasising R&D efforts in new-generation diesel technology; another is reinvigorating its electric motor technology. One will be advancing its plug in hybrid efforts, yet another is gearing up for expanded hydrogen fuel cell application, and still another, astonishingly, has announced its intention to have its fleet completely off petroleum altogether within 10 years. A dark horse technological startup, but perhaps my personal favorite, is an engine that runs on compressed air.

Taking a look at the wide divergence represented by these technological paths, along with the fact that the oil industry itself is showing signs of deciphering the writing on the wall, big changes are afoot, which necessarily means that there will be some short to medium term instability.

If our next car may run on something other than gas, how close or how far will we need to travel to refuel? Can existing gas stations expand their infrastructure to include many, most, or all fueling options as they become available? Or will some hang back awaiting a sense for one of them to reveal itself as dominant in and preferred by the marketplace?

Yes. It is great, and necessary, and helpful, and exciting that these innovations are taking place. And it’s about friggin’ time.

Not at all intending to have rained on my guy’s parade, I am frustrated nonetheless. And I’m not yet prepared to let the auto industry off the hook. Nor our elected officials. Nor, frankly, us, the American consumer. Our collective intransigence has not served us well, and the very matter of our dragging our feet for so long forms the foundation for the frustration that I let loose.

For crying out loud: my parents were getting 40 miles per gallon with the early-US import Subarus that they were driving in the late 1970′s and early 80′s. I see a car ad on the tube, replete with voiceover all self-congratulatory about 32 mpg, and I want to heave a brick through the screen.

And I can’t help but recognize how I feel on the matter to be merely a different shade of the same color of frustration that caused me to go on hiatus from the environmental field to begin with.

Having entered it fresh out of school, young and eager, fired up and ready to go, it was empowering to start my day feeling as though I was making the world a better place. And then I’d continue to see it: our vehicles grew larger; our local greenspace would give away to one needless strip mall after another; arable, productive farmland would become consumed by flavorless McMansion sprawl.

It just didn’t seem like we were paying sufficient attention.

The data kept coming, and–was it through arrogance? ignorance? biblically-derived dominion over all of creation?–it just seemed as though we were consciously determined to head in a direction in willful defiance of all readily available indicators.

And somewhere along the way, my bright-eyed feeling of making the world a better place was crowded out by a Sisyphian sense that what I was doing was, at best, merely slowing the pace of things getting worse.

So–hooray for me!–I’m forced to confront the fact that the frustration that threw me off my game lingers. And, apparently, festers.

Mirrors are useful devices for directing the light of day to all manner of dark, hidden recesses.

I’m open to being proven wrong. To be made wiser. And of far greater value–and I’m certainly open to this, too–would be to reclaim a glass-is-half-full default reaction when I encounter and ponder the challenges that face us.

And quite possibly, and with luck, therein will lie the value and purpose of this nascent blogging exercise, as I dive in.